Good web design or bad?

Dean was talking in the lecture about finding examples of good website design, and Camille’s website came to mind. It’s slightly different now to when I first saw it, but the underlying layout is the same.

It’s one of those sites that I think looks incredible – really different and intriguing – but actually isn’t all that great to use. I’m not sure if viewing the French version would be better, but I find that it’s hard to navigate around the site, because you can’t ever see everything all at once. You can zoom out and peer at it all, but any labels (and things aren’t always labelled) are then too small to read. Even once you’ve zoomed in on something it isn’t always obvious what it is that you’re looking at. The navigation is also quite controlled. You can sometimes choose more than one direction, but not always. At times you are at the web designer’s mercy! It’s kind of an interesting way to learn about the lady and her tunes, but if you’re after fast facts (and let’s face it, that’s what the internet is all about) it can be frustrating.

Another blog post I came across the other day took a quick look at various big-brand websites over time, comparing the evolution of design. Some of them changed quite a lot (Nike, MTV, Adobe), and are noticeably cleaner and sharper than their earlier counterparts, but there were others that really hadn’t altered much at all. Amazon was one example, and it’s definitely a website that annoys me a bit. The author of the blog seemed to think that the Amazon layout hadn’t changed because users liked it the way it was, but I find it really busy and as a result, I only look at the parts I’m interested in. (I just type in the name of the book and go from there, ignoring all the other links, lists, ads, etc, etc.) I’m sure if Amazon deemed the layout of the page un-lucrative, they’d change it, so it must be working for them, but so much of the information there is wasted on me.

It does seem to me to be a particularly American style of webpage. (Even though the UK page looks very similar, I put that down to it working off the US template.) Of course there are millions of US sites that are very cleanly designed (like those mentioned above) but that particular Amazon style with lots of little text-heavy fields screams US of A. They invented the internet, after all. It’s a style that turns up on lots of book covers too, which is originally where I started thinking about it (particularly when the same book is published in a number of markets). I’ll add a few examples tonight…